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Most seek the safety net of a pool for mining.Running a gpu for hours or days and getting zero coins requires patience.In simple math if you mine any proof of work coin solo your yield each day should average out to the same you can earn in a pool or actually more if the pool charges a fee and still more if the pool payout is a pplns system as with solo mining there are no 'ramping up' rounds.

Still in todays world of mining coins I know I am a member of a small minority who prefer to solo mine.

Here are the basics (I may edit & expand this later)

1) I will assume you are on win x2) download qt wallet3) 'synch up' blockchain4) close the client and find the file folder C:\computer\root\Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming\Yourcoin5) although I may edit this in the future this is for scrypt 1024 (litecoin) based coins or sha 256d (bitcoin) based coins only. For n factor, Groestl, DarkCoin & all others I will add to the post later.

Here 'C' is your local drive (on some systems may be named different)root is LocalDiscC where C is your local drive (same thing here)xxx is your name or log in on the system and Yourcoin is the name of your coin.

5) Inside that folder make a new text file which should normally contain the following

(x is you name, P is your password, y is the rpc port the coin uses and z is the communication port the network uses. The rpcport on MOST coins can be set to anything but not all coins work this way.the port line can usually be left out as can the listen and daemon lines. Including these lines increases your chance at getting a solid connection to the network.

if the coin ANN thread or description has any nodes listedmake a line for each one and add those like this

addnode=h.h.h.haddnode=j.j.j.jh and j are the octets of the ip address , sometimes a domain is used.

6) Rename that file Yourcoin.conf (note -- not Yourcoin.text.conf or it won't work.)upper and lower case should not matter on windows when naming your conf file but spelling the coin correctly matters. Save it as a read only file. Restart the coin client again.

7) Start up your favorite mining program replacing the address you used to pool mine withhttp://127.0.0.1:y -u X -p Q

I plan to update this guide soon with more detailed information and will include suggestions for settings of scan time & other tips to help you.

Update 1 Sept 2014

How to solo mine cryptonote coins

Cryptonote based coins (see the section here on the forum) are not forks of bitcoin and most do not have even a gui.

They are run on command line and it is actually easy to solo mine them once your wallet is set up.

Here is a short guide on how to solo mine them.

Download the coin for your system, you will get the best results on windows systems 64 bit

Lets use Quazar Coin as our example here.

When you unzip the file you see a few things there. Unzip them to where you want to keep your wallet and when ready start QuazarCoinD and it will start downloading the blockchain. It may take a while.

If you cannot do this in one session type on the command line

exit

so it saves your progress or you will be starting over again

(save) also should work

It may take a day or so (or more as the blockchain grows taller) to get it downloaded at somepoint it will say you are synchronized and you can start simple wallet. I strongly recommend you type

exit

at this time store the blockchain, wait, and after the 'dos box' type window closes , fire it up again,

It should give you this same message pretty quickly, now you are ready to start simplewallet.

Double click on it and since it is your first time starting it you have to create a wallet name and password.

Don't forget it. (note this is not a comprehensive guide on how to use these coins - you can find that elsewhere just how to set up for solo mining)

at this point your wallet should show your wallet address (normally much much longer than the base 58 type addresses used with bitcion) and a balance of zero

type

refresh

it should count up

after it does

type

start_mining x

where x is the number of cores of your cpu you want to go to work.

If you have an 8 core machine you may want to use just 7 or 3 on a 4 core machine.

If everything goes well in the daemon window which must always stay open if your wallet is open it will say how many threads have started mining,.

In the daemon window you can type

show_hr

to have it display how fast you are mining

If you hit a block you will see evidence of such in the daemon window if you are actually watching when you solve it and after it matures you will have access to the coins by typing

refresh

in simple wallet

everytime you close down before you close down type

save

in simple wallet

and

exit

in the daemon

note to stop mining just type

stop_mining

in the simple wallet window

A few tips and points here....

Since this is about solo mining not how to use these coins I skipped a lot of things like how to lock your wallet, how to send coins ect.....read the instructions......

I would strongly suggest you NOT solo mine bitmonero, due to it's popularity the network difficulty is so high your chances of solo mining a block with a cpu are probably about as good as solo mining a block of litecoin with a cpu at this point.

Also there are miners you can get and some can be used for solo mining. Some are closed source and used for pool mining only. I have left them out of this brief basic introduction since there are many other places on the forum you can look up how to use those tools, this guide is for solo miing only !!!

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I've been having trouble solo mining with an S1. It can't seem to connect but my spare Jalapeno works just fine via the usually instructions. Is there some special preparation needed for networked devices? I'm connected via wifi.

If you are solo mining and all blocks are being rejected and you mention a device that is an asic unit i assume you are using about a 5-10 ghs unit to mine some sha 256 d coin.

If difficulty is really low an asic will not work at all.

You will need to use a gpu. If difficlty is higher like say bitcoin, ppc, some good settings (depending on what kind of firepower you run since solo mining sha 256 at high difficulty is almost zero chance of hitting a block) you would want scan time to a second or two, expiry time to about 60-120 seconds and q (the number of extra work qued) to go up depending on what you are running. If your asic miner has 16 little units in it I would set that q value to at least 16.

Keep in mind , if you were to solo mine bitcoin right now as of July 15 2014, the difficulty is 17,336,316,979 --- think about that for a second.....

So the current target is 00000000000000003F6BE6000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

If you are mining submitting shares of difficulty 1 (which is what almost all solo mining is essentially) right now each share you submit has a

0.0000000000000000000134300204148799949123389623970026285%

chance of hitting a block ......

That means if you wanted to solomine bitcoin right now you really have almost no chance with less than 500 terrahash to 1 petahash in my opinion.

To answer the guy above who is mining teacoin and having problems you are not solomining if you are pointed at a strantum server you are mining in a pool unless you are running your own pool and only you are a member of it, (if you knew how to do that I don't think you would need the answer to this question)

I am not famaliar with an icarus unit but a majority of asic devices are NOT set up to solo mine !!

You can pool mine with them but not solo mine out of the box. If you want to mine a coin with these units and there are no pools you feel comfortable joining you can easily set up your own p2pool. Look at the bitcoin wiki here.

One thing about p2pool all shares are difficulty 1 and can result in many many stales as difficulty starts to go up.

Normally in p2pool you mine with a configuration using your coin wallet address as the user , anything or x as your password

So you can place numbers and a slash after your address to adjust the difficulty level and pseudo share diffficulty aka local difficulty (what the p2pool feeds you)

What is that ?

See here , it may look like this:

address/<number>+<number>

Here is a real example :

If i was mining bitcoin with p2pool I may configure like this

- u 17pwTLgVhFsozanJDwDShnc4DJEP8yTMrW/10000

Where the 10,000 figure is the difficulty of shares I want to submit.

- u 17pwTLgVhFsozanJDwDShnc4DJEP8yTMrW/10000+64

This can cut down on stales (where difficulty is high and you don't want your device just overflowing with difficulty 1 shares.

So if there is any real interest in this , I will post more information and examples. p2pool is very different than solo mining, even if you make your own private pool since the coin you want to mine has no pool you trust. Honestly a lot of this is 'outdated' and no longer used in todays mining world although at one time it had a lot of importance in mining of btc and early clones.

If anyone needs to learn how to solo mine any other coins post your requests here I will follow the topic !!

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not sure what specs are on your miner, many asic's offer only mining from pools and if you want to solo mine you have to basically 'create' your own pool which can be done in linux fairly easily however is not for beginners and would need at least a linux virtual machine or box , (I don't think the pi would be able to host the pool is what i mean)

Hi,

If i'm using a rocket box miner running at 525GH/s and it is being controlled by a raspberry PI and currently running in a pool. how do i swap it over to run solo?

would i need to flash the mining SD card to a new sd card and config it to solo? if so how do i do this??

or do i have to slave the miner to my computer? i have no idea how to do that)

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not sure what specs are on your miner, many asic's offer only mining from pools and if you want to solo mine you have to basically 'create' your own pool which can be done in linux fairly easily however is not for beginners and would need at least a linux virtual machine or box , (I don't think the pi would be able to host the pool is what i mean)

hmmmmm, thanks for the advice - its a rockminer rocket RK box. for reference. so it looks like illl need to stick to the pools or set up a liniux system. would this include the use of the 'bitsolo' pool??

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Before mining on any pool check the block stats to see when the last block was found.

Bitsolo last block was found June 23, and from how it looks if you are not the block finder you don't get paid. If you have a low hash rate, Id go with a Pay Per Share pool. That way you get paid for all shares you find instead of hoping you hit a block to get paid.

I spend half the week mining Btc and other times mining new Sha altcoins. Its worked out pretty decent with my 200ghs

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